New Shoots – people making fresh choices in a changing world
“I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.”
~ Socrates
The book, New Shoots – people making fresh choices in a changing world (©Lustig & Ringland 2021) is now out on Kindle and paperback on your local Amazon site.
How can we help in the meantime?
We can help you to explore the future.
What we have found is that by focusing on the future, we can help organisations and people prepare now for the changes expected. Covid-19 has accelerated the pace of change. And so has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The directions of travel may seem scary – we balance this by discussing where the opportunities may lie. And we know that, in the past, people and society have managed to triumph over many hard times. To help people today, we describe the forces for change as well as the disruptive forces that will affect the way that trends emerge and interact, and what might deflect the trends.
Thinking about the future
A trend is not a forecast – it’s a direction of travel. So, we can describe an aspect of the past decades by saying for instance the trend has been for people to move to urban areas from rural, so that now, for the first time more people live in towns than the countryside. When we use trends to describe the future, we might expect some of the past trends to continue. So, people are expected to continue the trend to move to towns, in general. But, there will be some people who “buck the trend” such as families moving to rural areas to bring up small children in areas with less air pollution. The important thing to understand is both the trends and the disruptors.
New Shoots
New Shoots offers readers a framework for thinking about the outside world. It enables them to find New Shoots of opportunity for life after the Covid-19 pandemic, as they seek to reach their preferred futures.
Life is evolving very differently from life before the pandemic: the pandemic has overturned many assumptions, accelerated change, disrupted countries and global social, economic and industrial structures. The old rules are no longer working. This book explores how to successfully innovate, influence, and navigate the new rules as they emerge.
New Shoots builds on the authors’ work developing strategy with organisations from Mexico to Indonesia. This work has created a database of evidence from across the globe on forces for change, which Millennials are using to create their preferred futures.
New Shoots tells stories of the evolving world from a number of perspectives, following these forces for change. Each chapter of the book describes a force for change such as Population, Energy Choices, or Biology. We start each chapter with “Learning from people with fresh ideas” follow the evolving story of the force for change, then describe the disruptors – Covid-19 and others – and explore what else might happen. “Snapshots” from around the planet highlight examples of people and organisations successfully innovating under the new rules: what has worked in one place, can provide inspiration somewhere else.
We know that there will be more disruption over the next decade. This book releases imagination, energy and innovation in our readers, allowing Millennials to over-ride what could be a fearful future with plans for constructive action.
Here is a link to the curated database containing the data behind each chapter of New Shoots.
About us:
Patricia Lustig leads LASA Insight Ltd, a strategic foresight company. She uses foresight, horizon scanning and futures tools to help organisations develop insight into emerging trends, develop a successful strategy and implement the changes. She understands the need to explore potential futures to develop robust corporate strategy and implement successful change. She has worked in EMEA, South and Southeast Asia, Canada and the USA at major blue-chip companies BP, Motorola and Logica. She is the author or co-author of four books and numerous articles. She is a Board member of the Association of Professional Futurists where she is responsible for their flagship Emerging Fellows Programme. Her recent award-winning book, Strategic Foresight: learning from the future is under negotiation for translation into Chinese by Science Press, Beijing.
Gill Ringland was head of strategy at ICL (now part of Fujitsu) and CEO and Fellow of SAMI Consulting. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is now an Emeritus Fellow of SAMI and a Director of Ethical Reading. She has been co-opted onto EC and British government advisory bodies covering IT, Economic and Social Research, and Foresight. She has worked across Europe, Mexico, Malaysia, Japan, Canada and the USA. She is the author or co-author of eight books, used widely in Business Schools including Harvard, and numerous articles. She provided the section on Scenario Planning for the Bloomsbury publication “The Ultimate Resource: Business”.
Patricia and Gill ‘s book Megatrends and How to Survive Them: preparing for 2032 has been widely welcomed. They provided the foresight expertise for the ‘Study on Building and Piloting a Strategic Intelligence Foresight System for future Research and Innovation (R & I) Framework Programmes’ for the European Commission. They have run many workshops and webinars based on Megatrends and New Shoots with organisations ranging from local councils and government to organisations (for example the Association for Strategy Professionals (ASP)).
We blog for Long Finance and Radix Think Tank
We work through LASA Insight Ltd and SAMI Consulting Ltd.
Quotes from people who have worked with this material:
“Thank you so much, your session was brilliant. I think we could have all sat there for another few hours discussing the mega trends.” Caroline Gratrix.
“How can we share these insights with our grandchildren to help them navigate this confusing world?” Peter Haas
“Gill Ringland and her colleagues have been my ‘go-to’ source for insight into future trends for many years.” Francesca Lagerberg.
“Ah-ha, I’ve been looking for this!” Shameem Siddiqi
“A visionary model of megatrends that are influencing our lives at all levels.” Dr Harbeen Arora.
“… this will help people to orient their futures thinking in relation to the sustainability of their organisation.” Professor Ted Fuller
“…an invaluable starting point, especially if used effectively.” Dr Bruce Lloyd, Emeritus Professor
“You energised a large group of CFOs to talk about megatrends for the future – a topic they might not normally think about!” Conference organiser